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Review of Foundations of Pragmatics International Journal of Language Studies Volume 7, Number 1, January 2013, pp. 175-184 Book Review Bublitz, W., & Norrick, N. R. (Eds.). (2011). Foundations of pragmatics. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. [710 pp: ISBN 978-3-11-021425-3 (hardcover)]. 1. Introduction Foundations of Pragmatics is one of the nine volumes of the series of Handbooks of Pragmatics. The series contains nine self-contained volumes which provide a comprehensive overview of the entire field of pragmatics. The nine handbooks cover a variety of topics including patterns of linguistic actions, functions of language, types of inferences, principles of communication, frames of knowledge, attitude and belief, and principles of text and discourse. The handbooks follow two objectives. They cover theories, approaches, concepts and topics of pragmatics. They also follow a definite structure, which gives coherence to the field of pragmatics. Each volume pursues a particular aim. All the articles are state-of-the-art reviews and critical evaluations of the topics in the ongoing developments. As the opening volume in the series, Foundations of Pragmatics focuses on micro and macro units and operates with a wide conception of pragmatics. The volume deals with approaches “that are traditional and contemporary, linguistic and philosophical, social and cultural, text- and context-based, as well as diachronic and synchronic” (p. vi). It provides historical, conceptual, theoretical and methodological views based on which the other handbooks can be associated to each other and to the development of the field of pragmatics. 2. Summary of the Content Foundations of Pragmatics consists of five parts and covers 23 papers selected on different topics. The first section is called Conceptual Foundations and consists of four papers which cover the fundamental issues on Pragmatics. Chapter One written by Anita Fetzer, Pragmatics as a Linguistic Concept defines pragmatics as a linguistic concept and mentions that various attempts have been made to systematize the complex field of pragmatics. The author conceptualizes pragmatics as a perspective, which contains a general pragmatic perspective, a social perspective, a compositional perspective and a relational perspective. It also differentiates between linguistic pragmatics and general (or non-linguistic) pragmatics. She analyzes action and cooperation in ISSN: 2157-4898; EISSN: 2157-4901 © 2013 IJLS; Printed in the USA by Lulu Press Inc. 176 A. Chalak & H. Heidari Tabrizi general pragmatics and discusses presupposition, common ground, context, and cooperation. In linguistic pragmatics, concepts such as speech act and implicature are analyzed. Fetzer believes that “linguistic pragmatics and general pragmatics share almost identical goals: general pragmatics examines pragmatic principles, mechanisms and universals in the context of action theory, rationality and intentionality, while linguistic pragmatics focuses on their instantiation in language and language use” (p. 44). Chapter Two, Micropragmatics and Macropragmatics, written by Piotr Cap defines micropragmatics as the pragmatics of utterance-based concepts such as speech acts, and macropragmatics as the pragmatics of discourse as well as text-based concepts such as topics, discourse markers. The author claims that micropragmatics and macropragmatics complete each other. The chapter deals with the concepts of deixis, presupposition, implicature and speech acts as the central concepts in the methodology of pragmatics and discusses these concepts from a micropragmatic and macropragmatic perspectives. The paper reviews locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary constituents of utterance force. It also shows how individual utterances can shape sequences to make a discourse or text. Pragmalinguistics and Sociopragmatics written by Sophia Marmaridou discusses the distinction between pragmalinguistics (dealing with forms, or what form to use to achieve an intended pragmatic effect) and sociopragmatics (dealing with pragmatic strategies, or when to use a particular pragmatic strategy), and claims that this distinction “seems to be at odds with the fact that the borderline between the two is often fuzzy, to the extent that they are often thought of as the two end points of a continuum” (p. 76). She reviews the borders between the two concepts from the perspective of Leech (1983) and Thomas (1983), discusses the distinction in a cross- linguistic and cross-cultural perspective, and examines their contribution to historical pragmatics and corpus linguistics. She describes that pragmalinguistics is the study of certain resources that a language provides for conveying illocutionary and interpersonal meaning, whereas sociopragmatics relates pragmatic meaning to other factors such as community’s social norms and rules, participants’ social distance, and appropriate behaviors. The author proposes the figure/ground schema and believes that the figure/ground relationship presents pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics “distinct, but interacting, instances of perspectivisation” (p. 78). Chapter Four, Metapragmatics by Axel Hübler, focuses on metapragmatics as the study of explicit and implicit metacommunication. The chapter discusses topics of metacommunication, such as Grice’s maxims, Leech’s politeness principle, etc; it reviews the purposes of metacommunication comments such International Journal of Language Studies, 7(1), 175-184 177 as evaluation, defending, or questioning, target and the forms of realization. The chapter describes two aspects: (a) what linguists/experts observe about people’s act or interaction; and (b) what experts observe about their practice. Hübler believes that observing communication and describing/systematizing these observations are the viewpoints that are saved for the professional linguist, while theorizing the conditions and implications is open for both professional and ordinary conversationalists. The second section is dedicated to the Theoretical Foundations of Pragmatics. It starts with “The Rise of Pragmatics: A Historiographic Overview” by Wataru Koyama. While emphasizing on the newness of the field, the chapter traces linguistic pragmatics. It asks questions such as how, why, when and by whom the field of linguistic pragmatics has established. The author examines key concepts of linguistic pragmatics such as speech act, presupposition, implicature, context, function, and reference. The chapter presents a historiographic account and discusses that the linguistic pragmatics comes out of the Continental tradition not Anglo-American tradition. In Chapter Six, Semiotic Foundations of Pragmatics, Winfried Nöth connects pragmatics to its foundations in semiotics. He explains how the development of pragmatics was influenced by semiotics by focusing on the contributions of dominant characters such as Peirce, Morris and Carnap. According to their framework, pragmatics is one of the branches of semiotics. Main issues in pragmatics including “the questions concerning intention and purpose, meaning and reference, word and object, interpretation and communication, or the relationship between language and action, find fundamental answers in the writings of the founder of general semiotics and philosophical pragmatism (or pragmaticism)” (p. 11). The author also mentions that communication is a central issue of semiotics and introduces a communication model in linguistic pragmatics known as semiotic model. The model has six factors known as addresser, message, addressee, context, code, and contact and each of these factors is the contributing factor to a specific communicative function. Nikola Kompa and Georg Meggle in Pragmatics in Modern Philosophy of Language trace the origins of linguistic pragmatics in the Philosophy of Language in the works of Austin, Searle, Wittgenstein, Strawson, and Grice. They elaborate on two approaches to language and meaning: formal semantics and pragmatic semantics. In the first, “semantics is taken as given and the aim is to incorporate as many context-sensitive aspects of language as possible into that semantics”; in the second, “research is trying to spell out the semantics on a pragmatical (action-theoretical) basis itself” (p. 11). While presenting both paradigms of pragmatics, the authors mention the basic problems as well as the state of the art in this regard. 178 A. Chalak & H. Heidari Tabrizi Saskia Daalder and Andreas Musolffin follow the roots of pragmatics in functional approaches to linguistics in Chapter Eight entitled Foundations of Pragmatics in Functional Linguistics. The authors trace the historical connections from Bühler, Jakobson, Hymes, to contemporary scholars in pragmatics and review that scholars such as Wegener, Bühler, Mathesius, and Jakobson were aware of the role of language in the life and culture of the people. These modernist theorists projected some pragmatic aspects on language which did not separate semantics from pragmatics. The authors conclude that although their works may lack systematic treatment of pragmatic facts, they still have potentials for different branches of pragmatics. Christine Domke and Werner Holly discuss two main questions in Chapter Nine entitled Foundations: Ethnomethodology and Erving Goffman. They ask what the Ethnomethodology is and what impact Ethnomethodology had on linguistic pragmatics. The authors outline Harold Garfinkel and his perspective on everyday life of the people by reviewing some early ethnomethodological investigations, and basic assumptions of ethnomethodology.
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